MAR-B-4
THE FIRST DAY
OF SPRING IN THE SNOWY,
SUNNY
MOUNTAINS AROUND LAKE TAHOE
TAHOE FROM THE
TAHOE CITY GORMAN HOUSE,
AS I AWAIT THE
RETURN OF ERRANT LUGGAGE,
AND BASK IN
THE GLOW OF THE SUNNY SNOWY MOUNTAIN SCENE OF CALIFORNIA’S SKI HAVENS
IN SPRING SKIING
March 20—21, 2004
I have awakened to the view around me that I
certainly did not see last night—or rather, four hours ago. The Gorman house is on a hill with the
groomed ski slopes only a few hundred yards up the end of this street which is
served by a chair lift. I saw kids in
their clumsy boots walking up the road, with the snowboards over their heads,
on their way to over-heating, since the sun is out and it is a beautiful day. I can look from here to the Lake—the
largest in California. I remember
from my touring around it and climbing up over it in the 99 year I did the John
Muir Trail coming back from Whistler’s in BC to San Francisco, then renting a
car and driving through this area for a chance to tour the Tahoe area and the
Mammoth mountains and the Devil’s Post Pile, before going down to Bishop California
and there starting off on the “omega loop” of the JMT through the Eastern
Sierras. When I was here touring Tahoe
and hiking over it, I remember a statistic, that if the water in this 1400+
foot deep lake were released, it would cover all of California
to a depth of 14 inches. There are many
snow fed creeks and rivers running in, and only one river running out, and I
believe, if I can still remember, it is the Truckee
River that I crossed after midnight last night. But that single outflow is what prevents this
lake basin a deep residual of the glacial ice age, from being a salt lake.
Now that the sun is out and the
snowmelt is going on, I can see the large mounds of snow all around this
mountainside house. I can also go out on the deck and could even go for a dip
in the 100* hot tub. The air is thin at
this 7200 foot level so that it would be easy to be sunburned on a day like to
day—the clear first day of Spring. The snowmelt is trickling off the roof and
the streets out front are dry. It would
be an ideal day for a high altitude long run---if, of course, I had my running
shoes and kit and were not stuck to the house awaiting the late arrival of my
baggage, which is the result of the late connections between NWA and its Alaska
Air affiliate. In the instructions that
I had forwarded to me, the Gormans were so generous as to offer the use of all
the ski, snowshoe and winter clothes and equipment with which the house is
packed, but I would rather see what will come from the delivery service of the
missed connections on the two light soft-sided bags I had checked in. I do not have heavy duty clothes therein
since remember I am heading from here for five days to two weeks in Taiwan,
which is more that ten degrees latitude south of the southern most Japanese
islands. Being in the northern
hemisphere, they are all having the same first day of Spring today—meaning the
sun has just crossed the Equator on its way north, and there is an equatorial
Equinox today, with twelve hours of daylight and twelve of night—just as I have
most all of the year when I am perched on the Equator. I have my own wheels since I rented a car and
would dearly love to use this magnificent day to go out exploring this
wonderful environment, but will have to await the delivery before I can see
what is happening around me.
This housebound position has made
it possible for me to sit near the phone, and to receive the calls from Sammy
Gorman and from Virginia—and not
yet from the Alaska Air service that should be delivering my bags. I had spell-checked the Mar-B-2 chapter I had
mostly completed in the lengthy layover in DTW while hooked to electricity. When I tried to sp[ell check the chapter in
the air, I found that the battery life is now down to something like ten
minutes, and even now, it seems like the battery is not taking in and holding a
charge, which bodes ill for my use of the long flights to write the description
of this adventure. So, it is also good
that I have brought my very richly informative book “King Leopold’s Ghost”
about the stories of the exploration of Henry Moreton Stanley and King Leopold
“King of the Belgians.” This is a
primer on the colonialism of Africa. I may have it and the back up book completed
if the laptop battery continues to be so badly holding so limited a charge.
SAMMY GORMAN CALLS AND WE CATCH UP
ON INTERIM EVENTS,
INCLUDING THE TRIP TO INDIA SHE WILL BE
TAKING AND I WILL NOT THIS YEAR
Sammy Gorman called, and we were
able to catch up on the details of her life and the interval since we last
compared notes. The graduation for her
degree in osteopathy will be on June 6, and then she is not doing a residency
for the coming year when they are trying to work out a time when the whole
family can get to Leh Ladakh to solemnize the marriage of Sammy and
Jigmet. They had had a bit of a falling
out with Ravi, much as I had had, and Jigmet’s father
before him, about the quality of the Himalayan Health Exchange’s foisting
freshman medical students who know nothing
abut clinical medicine on a group of increasingly sophisticated consumers. Ravi’s solution to this was to call them all
doctors rather than getting any more people with the kinds of credentials that
I have, and he got one community based physician who said he would round up a
few folk, and with no teaching experience and no prior experience in the field,
they alone would lead the trip—specifically not me, the only one with the
experience and credentials. If I wanted
to come and take orders from people who are not up to my standards about how
they want to run this business enterprise with an ever increasing number of
naďve freshmen students in their first clinical encounters with patients of any
kind, then they do not need me. Jigmet’s
father is the chief medical officer for the large region of Ladakh in the J and
K province. He had previously been
disillusioned with the Ravi way of flooding the
countryside withy a band of novices equipped with the MAP packs that I had
helped align with the HHE, now misrepresented as being under the careful tight
control of the licensed medical leader who had originally applied for them.
So, there has been no contact between the
Jigmet/Sammy connection from the time I had first taken her to India
and the two subsequent years of loser affiliation as she met and married
Jigmet, son to ht CMO of Ladakh. She had
been prevented from going along on the Lingshed trek the prior year because of
the sensitivity of the situation with the host of the mission being a potential
father-in-law, and I had written her a letter introducing her to the superb
program that Laji Varghese runs in Manali ant Lady Willingdon Hospital which is
a kind of mission endeavor that Ravi is ignorant of and prejudiced against since
he is death on any Christian missionaries, sine he says he does not want to
have anything to do with the proselytizing of a mission group having had all he
can take of that by having married a Catholic.
Nothing could be further from reality, since I have worked with Moslem,
Hindu, Sikh, and predominantly Buddhist centers—and in the most recent one, all
Islamic in Somaliland, and in Ethiopia, Jewish and Mother Teresa’s Sisters of
Charity—and all these sources were welcome, with none of them eliciting the
vehement protests against the motivations that gave rise to the donations to
match Ravi’s cursing all missionary evangelists, like the wonderful Laji
Varghese’s Manali operations.
We had a falling out over this earlier, and I
am sure that if MAP (Help and Healing for a Hurting World” knew of his position
vis a vis mine, there would be an end to his
unsupervised orders for and large scale distribution of medicines contrary to
the purposes of their restrictions.
THE CALL FROM ALASKA AIR;
“WAIT ANOTHER DAY—IT WILL GET THERE!”
How can anyone be in this glorious
setting on a perfect day and find themselves at a loss as to what to do? I would fault my kids for such unimaginative
inability to entertain themselves—and I have, during some of our trips through
the most spectacular of this world’s sights to be seen when they were
expressing boredom. I am certainly not bored, but frustrated. This would be a perfect day for a run, and I
have all the gear, checked into two bags that will not be here in time for me
to use them. Meanwhile, the house is
filled with all the skis skiwear, snowshoes, and an abundance of other good
things to be done out there, and I had decided not to sit by the phone any
further but to take off and see the Truckee River at its outlet from Lake Tahoe
and see the sights along the route in and the turn off to Squaw Valley. There is where I should be checking in on
Monday, probably into facilities less splendid than this one, but by then I
should have my stuff. But, I will try to
run in street shoes if needed if only I had shorts and a tee shirt rather than
a sweater, and some kind of sweat socks. I did not want to become that
intrusive to see if I could find anything like that which might fit me. So, I drove up the hill to see where the kids
had popped onto the lifts and up the mountain mainly snowboarding. It is the kind of day that the girls are
wearing halter tops, and skiing though the wet snow to sit at the side of the
ski lift and take a sun bath. It is a
gorgeous day, and the best view I have seen so far, since I have not gone up
the .,lift to the mountain top, is right here from the deck next to the hot
tub---which I am hankering to enter but needed to run first to make that kind
of indulgence seem justified.
I drove back down to the Truckee
River and saw the bike trail
alongside a parking lot now labeled “Snow Storage Area” and went to see the
crystal clear and low Truckee River,
confirming my impression that it is, in fact, flowing OUT of Lake
Tahoe. If I remember there
are 23 inflows and only one out, the one that keeps this magnificent huge body
of water still clean and pure without an increased salinity for the huge
evaporation which must put tons of water per hour into the air. I poked around the undercut snow banks hanging
over the river, and remember seeing the outlet Lake
Tahoe dam at Tahoe City
in the middle of the night last night and would return to it on the far side of
this trip to Squaw Valley. I drove down to see the turn off to the Squaw
Valley developed mountains slopes in the Tahoe
National Forest, and there are the
Olympic rings above and the Olympic torch below a large number of proprietary
names. I believe this was the site of
the winter games perhaps 24 years ago.
I pulled up along the East Lift and
the Red Dog area and watched as large numbers of kids and other snowboarders
came down from the exhilaration of the run.
They also had come to eat at the numerous ski chalet type places most
all of which patrons were sitting outside in the sun having peeled off as many
layers as the patrolling security force would allow. As busy as it is and as big, the very vast
space of this valley makes it very quiet, as though the sound disappears in
swooping up from the origin of it down here.
The little kids were strapped into bungey cords and jumping on
trampolines, even the youngest of them doing expert flips and somersaults. Adults were queued up to have a spectacular
looking young woman gouge her elbows into back muscles on the special chair she
had carried in for the massage purpose.
It was a good alpine scene, more European than the lesser slopes of
other places I had seen, Whistlers excepted.
I noted the elevation which is from 6,800 feet to 8,200 feet, around the
level I had climbed when here in 1999 looking down into Lake Tahoe
as I also had in the chain of lakes of Mammoth
Mountain further down the
Sierras. I marked the Squaw
Valley, of course, at
SQUA= 39* 11. 46 N and 120* 13. 43
W at the elevations just mentioned.
I drove
back along the Squaw Creek and came to a couple of areas where I wanted to plod
out through the wet drifts of semi-packed snow to photo the undercut banks of
snow with the gurgling stream racing in under the banks. At one point I had got such a good shot of
this phenomenon that I forgot that I was standing on the opposite bank over a
similar under cut snow bank, and plunged one leg through. I got only a little wet, but I did get the
picture I was after!
When I went
back to the Tahoe City
dam on the Truckee River,
the site from which a number of companies run rafting trips down this clear
river, when the water level is lower than the legal limit, when with the full
runoff, the river running is prohibited as the sign says. I went to the pool below the spill way of the
small dam. I did not need to look long
to fins them. There were a dozen rainbow
trout as long as your leg, and a bit thicker—a group gown fat on bread crusts
and popcorn. On the surface above them were seagulls
and a few mallard ducks also awaiting the many bikers or families with
strollers, and, sure enough, the same appeared while I was there. The trout swirled and the birds flapped and
fought at the surface, while the tout seemed to have scored the most. I remembered that the last time I had seen
such huge pampered rainbows; they were in the pool below the holy man’s
riverside house where he spends all his time guarding and feeding them below
Dharamsala. I am sure that these trout,
like many of the other living things guarded by the religious motives of the
various groups I had cataloged above that were sponsors of the health missions,
are not primarily focused on the religious motives but the bread crumbs are
freely accepted from each.
Now without
shoes or shorts or the other gear to get out and really appreciate this outdoor
feast of wonders, I am going to have to be content with the spectator sports of
observing the beauty around me outside, until I cannot see it so clearly and
then may pop one of the videotape movies here in the VCR and fix a bit of
dinner. This may be a lower key level of
exertion than I might have hoped for but it is certainly an idyllic retreat.